“If all goes well at Penguicon, we’ll also be doing the same show at Ikasucon in Fort Wayne, IN in July and NMACon in Traverse City, MI in September.”

Though 24 hours before the show begins, they asked the twitniverse for “weird anime videos”. Maybe they’re sprinkling in some added bonus features. Maybe. Perhaps it’s going to be that, and some brand new riffs on the Penguicon 2011 experiment. Who knows. Let’s wait for the show report. Those are always fun.

Ikasucon is an anime convention being held the same weekend (July 8 – 10, 2011) as Shore Leave, a scienty fiction convention. But, if you get out your rocket belt in time to make it to tonight’s CFTP in Fort Wayne, you could mosey on over to Baltimore in time for Mystery Trekkie Theater 3000 this Sunday. Crisis averted!

Peter David, famous “writer of stuff”, and pals are going to be bringing their Mystery Trekkie Theater 3000 to Shore Leave again next weekend. David’s wife Kathleen blogs it up as well as it can be blogged, over on her blog: No Strings Attached. If that doesn’t sate your paraphrastical intereste, there’s a description on the events page of the shore leave website that warns of a Star Trek episode “so unspeakably ghastly that you may just want to make sure ahead of time that you know the way out. And we do mean way out.”

Shore Leave is a yearly science fiction convention being held in Baltimore, Maryland at Marriot’s Hunt Valley Inn from July 8 through 11. There has yet to be a publicly released schedule for Shore Leave 2011. But the ones that guests of the con have already seen are tentative anyway. So, Mystery Trekkie Theater will probably go on for an hour, probably that Sunday, and will probably start at 5pm. Your almaniacal reasoning may vary.

Update: the schedule has been posted and, as in years past, MTT3K indeed will start at 5 PM, on Sunday (July 10). It goes on until 6:30 and is the last event of the show.

The experiment for this year’s MTT is being kept secret until showtime. Though if you’d like to dwell on the past, information on previous performances of Mystery Trekkie Theater 3000, can be found at superfan Corey W. Tacker’s, comparitively up to date Lost Works.

we have begun filming episodes 4 and 5 of Mystery Fandom Theater 3000!

Hungry for more? Head on over to fanmst3k (the Yahoo! Groups group for discussing fan-made MST3K projects) for the full post, or wait for him to update the MFT3000 website (a website on the Internet for news and info on Mystery Fandom Theater 3000, a fan-made MST3K project), some time this week. Check out the episodes page on the latter, for links to previous MFT episodes on the Internet Archive.

Let’s get Vaguely Specific for a second here: Mystery Anime Theater. It’s a riffing project. It’s what has been dubbed at the MST3KFvaLpDb, T website as a “convid”. It is so far the only one with that distinction; a video created specifically to be shown at a convention. Early on, it was a live-show of sorts. They’d play that year’s anime target on a TV and read off jokes from the back of the room. You could argue that once they started pre-recording the show that MAT became a fanvid and that the word convid is extraneous. You could also argue that back in 2008, when Vaguely Specific Productions no longer had proper Shadowrama creating facilities that MAT stopped being even an MST3K-style fan-made video. Is it now a Rifftrax-style fanvid? Or, for that matter, a Spoony Experiment or a Film Crew? Or, now, a Cinematic Titanic? Whatever it is, it’s got riffing in it. And, anime. (You know, Japanese cartoons.) So, let’s give Vaguely Specific Productions some slack. The cast is too busy putting Nan Desu Kan together, and working during the actual convention, to do it live anymore. It’s not a live-show, no, but you do have to go to Nan Desu Kan (an anime convention) or Starfest (an “entertainment” convention) to see it. So, it is kind of like a one-shot deal you have to plan for, like the live-shows. Especially since they stopped showing recordings of previous years performances. It was just easier to call it a convid, check the live-show announcements page, and go on with life. We’ll deal with what is and what ain’t, later.

Right now, though, we can plan to catch a showing of Mystery Anime Theater at this year’s Nan Desu Kan. The convention is being held at the Marriot DTC in Denver, Colorado from September 9-11. MAT starts at 11PM, that Friday. It goes until midnight. Video rooms at NDK normally have a come and go as you please policy, but if you’ve travelled all that way, why not show up early?

The experiment this time will be Tekken.

Experiments featured in the last few years were The Fantastic Adventure Of Yohko Leda, Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture, and Voltron: The Fleet Of Doom.

Episode 2 (part 1 of 2) of Jason Soto’s Shortastic has been posted up on the YouTube. You can watch it there, or go watch it on his blog and make some “awesome sauce” comments. The experiment is a Kurt Russell vehicle called Dad, Can I Borrow The Car?.Update:

Jason Soto (B-Movie Central 5000) says he’s back in the riffing game. Today, he posted the first of what’s supposed to be a series of ten-ish minute videos, featuring him and other BMC5K alumnus Cokie the dog.

If you liked B-Movie Central 5000, and had been waiting desperately for the ill-fated Frogs! episode, get your cloaca in gear and check this out, in its stead. The first episode features a 1950’s industrial short called Let’s Make a Sandwich. Why a gas company was so interested in samiches that it decide that the world needed a short film describing how to make one is anyone’s guess. One thing’s for sure, though, is that those boys did so enjoy their Cokes and hotdogs.

Webcomic “Adam Smithee” has announced a new live-riffing event to be performed at Penguicon at the end of this month. He’s calling it Cinematic For The People. Based on the success of the show, it may travel to other venues, such as Ikasucon and NMACon. A tweet on the subject places the start-time of CFTP that Saturday, at 11PM. So does the Penguicon events schedule. But, like all cons, the schedule is in flux up until the closing ceremonies. So, check your local listings.

Cinematic For The People (CFTP for short) aims to be a full-feature experience, akin to actually watching an episode of MST3K live – complete with host segments, silly outfits, and a cameo appearance by our own suspiciously Servo-esque “Mr. Hal Sirveaux” at some point during the two hour long event. There will also be prizes, audience participation, and a singalong at some point.

On October 28, 2010, Mary Jo Pehl and Trace Beaulieu participated in an approximately hour-long interview as part of the CMS Colloquium Series podcast that comes out of the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies program. They were there in connection with Cinematic Titanic Live‘s premier of Rattlers!, being performed the next day at the Wilbur theater in Boston. At about 31 minutes into the interview, the two MST3K alums were asked about movie riffing as being an American-only phenomenon and Trace let out the there was a Russian version on YouTube. This set Chris ‘Sampo’ Cornell to digging and on 27 January 2011, he posted his findings as a news item on the Satellite News website: the opening theme song.

Where were you in November of 2009? Was it somewhere warm and cozy? Perhaps watching a fan film? A “Dr. Horrible” fanfilm?

Well, then maybe you’re not a Browncoat or a… um… Whesonesquer, because they all totally knew about it way before it even came out on YouTube or Vimeo and were already online blogging about it being minutes overdue and making “first!” comments all over the Jossaverse or Whedalaxy or the whathaveyouglobularcluster. Jealous?

Well, jeal no more. Binding Polymer is here to keep you up to date on the latest trend setting news. You can read all about Horrible Turn, a fanfilm giving homage to Joss Whedon et al’s award-winning, genre-creating, first-ever internet musical over at tubefilter news. They did a thorough job on the subject. Even freakin’ Entertainment Weekly (via popwatch) got in on the action. When reached for comment, Brian Uiga (of MST3K: Time and The Rani fame) said, “I actually didn’t have anything to do with Horrible Turn, I’ve been working solely as an engineer for the last five years.” Likely story.

Dr. Horrible: The Early Years is another unofficial, fan-made homage to DHSAB. It features some kid in a mad scientist get-up. In five total episodes, uploaded to YouTube way back in 2008, there’s a treehouse, a time machine, and… [spoilers truncated]. Even Captain Hammer makes an appearance. Yes, there’s singing.

And, yes, there’s more. You might have thought that Binding Polymer was merely the new home of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Fanvid and Live-performance Database website, The. It is, but not “merely”. This is the first inkling of expansion into other fan-made genres for BP. And, why not make a big deal about it and create a triumvirate of Joss Whedon fanfilm info with Browncoats: Redemption.

It’s a fanfilm of Firefly. That is to say, of Serenity (the Firefly movie), technically. They say that Joss Whedon had given them his royal nod before they began production. So, like Horrible Turn and Dr. Horrible: The Early Years, it’s not official, just fan-made.

And, that’s why Binding Polymer cares. What the producers of Browncoats: Redemption care about, however, are some charities. You can’t exactly watch Browncoats: Redemption without forking over some dough for a DVD or a ticket for a special screening, or the Bluray version due out in April. Besides Joss, they got permission from Josses bosses — at least as far as Firefly and Serenity go (Fox and Universal Studios) — to go ahead with their fanfilm as long as it was strictly not-for-profit. Accent on the strictly. Sales of tickets and whatnot go to benefit the “five great charities”. Those Browncoats are totally into helping out charities. They may never get a real Serenitysequel, or a Firefly series reboot. But, everything’s comin’ up shiny because they have their Browncoats: Redemption; and they have their charities; and they have a snazzy Electronic Press Kit! Klingons‘ve got nothing on ‘em.